How to Get Inspiration When You Need It

Julia Cameron is an interesting woman.  If you haven’t heard of her, chances are you have still seen some of her work. She is a creative tour de force and the world is a vastly more interesting place with her in it.  You may know her as an award-winning poet, playwright, and filmmaker.  She has written thirty books ranging from her widely-praised, hard-hitting crime novel The Dark Room to her volumes of children’s poems and prayers.  She worked for Rolling Stone magazine early in her career, which is where she met Martin Scorsese (whom she married and later divorced).  The thing I like best about her, however, is her passion to help others nurture their own creativity.  She believes that creativity is an authentic spiritual path.  I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about spirituality in this context.  I do, however, think her creative tools are incredibly useful.  One tool she recommends is an Artist’s Date.

I need something to help me get out of the creative slump I’ve been in for a few weeks now.  It’s not so much of a slump as it is a feeling of confusion that comes only when you’ve listened to too many other people’s opinion and stop listening to your own voice.  I reached the conclusion that I need to look to the outside world for inspiration, not advice.  So, this past Sunday, I took Julia Cameron’s suggestion and invited myself out on an Artist’s Date.  An Artist’s Date, if you don’t know, is something you do by yourself.  You take yourself somewhere where you can get inspiration, clear your head, feel nature, whatever.  The point is to get out in the world and both experience it and notice it.  It’s just that simple.

I decided to invite myself to the wonderful De Young Museum in Golden Gate park.  I spent 3 delicious hours wondering through various exhibits.  My favorites were the wood carvings from Oceana and Africa.  I then paid extra money to see the special King Tut exhibit.  (I don’t really know why I did this since I saw that exhibit at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, though it was nice the second time around too.)

During my wonderings I was struck by something that seems to be a recurring theme in my life lately: the importance of the feminine.  Or, perhaps more accurately stated, the importance of having both the masculine and the feminine present in equal balance and appreciating their unique ways of creating.  This is a concept that exists in many cultures.  In ancient Egypt, for example, there were powerful masculine and feminine symbols, gods and pharaohs in almost equal proportion.  In China, of course, there is the timeless yin yang symbol and much of the art is a celebration of both the masculine and feminine forms.  Interestingly, Western art over the past 2,000 years doesn’t place the same value on the divine feminine, raw nature, etc.  A look at European art over the last 2,000 years shows many religious scenes (e.g., where people pray to a male god or there is male priest as an intermediary) hunting scenes, war scenes, or pictures of fruit on a table.  Perhaps this is in large part because most of the artists in Western culture were men?  Or, is it as Dan Brown hypothesizes in his books, men wanted to suppress the powerful feminine?

My point here is not to get into a long historic or religious debate, but rather to say that I was struck by this realization in a way I hadn’t been before.  In western culture we run companies like we run armies.  Our companies are masculine in virtually every way.  We have rank and officers, we do competitive analysis, we focus on strategy and we schedule time to create new products and come up with new ideas in a conference room.  What would it look like if women started and ran businesses?  What would it look like if we focused more on creating and less on competing? How would the business world be different?  More interestingly, what if we took the best of the masculine and the best of the feminine ways of creating and combined those features in our business culture?  Would we have more fun and get more done with less effort?  Somehow I think we would.  This is a topic that interests me.  Case in point:  An Artist’s Date (a feminine concept and something fun and pleasurable to do) gave me profound insights and inspiration about business.  This is something I could never have gotten from a creative strategy session in a conference room.  Hmmmmm…..

I was having such a good time on my date that I didn’t want it to end.  So I took myself next to see Julie & Julia.  What a delightful movie.  Meryl Streep simply must win an Academy Award or I will lose all faith in the nominating committee.  What a brilliantly simple concept:  learn to cook from a famous cookbook and then blog about it.  I often say the genius is in the simplicity.  This was genius.  And now it’s a box office hit.  I love success stories like this.  They make me believe that anything in this life is possible (even if getting noticed by the New York Times is a giant catapult to success).

The movie ended and I felt happier than I had in weeks.  Inspired by Julie, I decided on the way home that I would pick up my own blog more seriously again (hence this entry).  Perhaps someone out there will find my insights and thoughts on business useful.  Perhaps not.  At the very least I get to enjoy the process of writing. Like I said, the genius is always, always in the simplicity.  And how simple was it to spend 6 hours enjoying art on a beautiful Sunday in San Francisco, the result of which gave me two fantastic business ideas and sparked my own creativity again?

Here is my useful business suggestion:  When you feel stuck on something, take yourself on an Artist’s Date.  (Thank you, Julia Cameron, for the suggestion).

For more ideas, check out the list of Artist’s Date suggestions on the The Artist’s Way Blog:  http://theartistswayblog.wordpress.com/artists-date-ideas/

Happy creating!

xoxo